Monday, August 15, 2005

How popular is your name?

I was looking around at the Social Security site today and I found a database of baby names. It has some amazing data. You can find the most popular names by year, by decade, by state—it’s actually very fun. I ran some data, and here are the numbers for my family.

Claire went from 86th most popular name in 2000, the year she was born, to 98th most popular last year.

Grace went from 69th most popular name in 1997, the year she was born, to 13th most popular last year.

Eric went from 18th most popular name in 1970, the year I was born, to 61st most popular last year.

Karen (her name before she changed the spelling) went from 12th most popular name in 1970, the year she was born, to 154th most popular last year.